My impression is that “swearing” (by which I mean vulgarity and not a breach of the Third Commandment) is on the rise in American culture. For good or bad, certain words, as Harold Hill would say, are creeping into our vocabulary, and I don’t mean words like “swell” and “so is your Old Man.” When most Evangelical students go to movies that routinely use the “f-word” and live in a sub-culture (secular academia), where what would have been considered profanity in an earlier generation is now accepted even by many professors, then those who do not “swear” run the risk of sounding precious and culturally clueless.
Just a quick glance at most blogs on the Left, and even some on the Right, reveals that what was vulgarity is now used as freely and openly as a teenager in California uses “like.”
At the moment certain words are in the delicate transition point when many of us (myself included) are no longer shocked when we hear vulgarities, but wish not to hear them as much as we do. Nor is it just being old that is the problem, since some young adults will always prefer gentler cadences and regret harshness. When Theodore Roosevelt could write, without a trace of irony, that it was uncommon to hear swearing amongst the officers of the Rough Riders, then it is easy to long for times with gentler vocabulary, but more manly behavior. We have too many emo-writers with rough language who look incapable of walking, let alone charging, up the San Juan hills.
Regret about baseness in popular culture, is particularly common amongst young adults at a place like Biola University where many students are more T.R. than South Park. None of us, however, have escaped the changes in language. Many students use one set of words with each other and another for faculty without being hypocrites. They are using professional language with the oldsters who anticipate it and trying to communicate to their peers at other times.
It is, therefore, still possible, if you work at a place like Biola or amongst older people, to still be shocked at the level of profanity and vulgarity on a leftist web site like Daily Kos. Whether for good or bad, old vulgarities are becoming like yesterdays “crap” . . . words that once were too vulgar for polite company, but now are not. In fact, it is becoming hard to know just how to swear in the culture of modern academia outside of the “devil words” of political correctness.
When even philosophers swear like sailors over everything, it is hard for sailors to swear meaningfully. (”This paper is @$%@ hard.” causes “@%@$%@ incoming!” to lose necessary force.)
Many would be shocked to discover that it would be worse in much of secular academia to call someone a “young lady” than to call her things that would have provoked a gun fight in T.R.’s time.
To paraphrase Senator Edwards, there are two Americas. There is the America where calling your opponent a (insert profanity here) freak is normal and the Other Places where it is not. Vulgar America is a place where blasphemy, the real kind, is still considered “daring” and the only offense would be feeling offended by it. There are Other Places where using the Lord’s name in vain is still considered rude.
If you live mostly in one place, then the other seems weird to you. In the Other Places, a lady or gentleman might swear (though with apologies later) when very angry. The “frankly Scarlet” line of attack is tolerated, if not encouraged in extreme circumstances.
Other America will tolerate a few rough words from T R when he was trying to move men forward under fire. Other America has never been that naive and knows that some leaders who were sailors will tend to swear like them in private, but they still live in a world where non-sailors do not swear like sailors.
They also expect the f-bomb to be used on people who should be bombed and not casually or in ways that they cannot avoid hearing it if they do not want to hear it.
Calling Hitler or Bin Laden a foul name will not be encouraged by the grandmothers of Other America, but it will provoke a tolerant grimace. These were or are very bad men and will have to get what is verbally coming to them.
The rules are different in Vulgar America where harsh language about almost anything is normal, but it is abnormal to think that there are bad men other than Hitler. The worst thing in Vulgar America is to dismiss an idea out of hand (except for the those of people who dismiss ideas out of hand). Vulgar America likes hard talk, but does not want to quit talking about much of anything.
Other America is most tempted to use a vulgarity when it hears Vulgar America unable to use vulgarity for terrorists.
Other America does not want to talk about the perspective of terrorist fascism. They will tolerate a dismissive McCain vulgarity in its direction, but they don’t want to hear their sacred things (God, duty, honor, country) dismissed that way. In Vulgar America, the notion that there are sacred things is the only idea easily dismissed and invite harshest language.
Most of academia and the media is part of Vulgarity America where owning a Precious Moments figurine (not part of ironic art) would be a worse breech of social protocol, than forcing your room mate to endure wildly violent and dark posters. Of course, for a person immersed in Vulgarity America, it is hard to grasp the fact that in much of America, including most religious non-profits, swearing on the job could cost you your job.
Since it controls much of academia and the media, Vulgarity America insists on viewing the rest of the nation as “weird” or out of step. A dorm room in UCLA and its vocabulary is “real,” but a Christian school is not. Even Christian students will accept this strange secular ethnocentrism as they will often want to break out the “Christian bubble” in order to break into some equally insulated secular bubble in graduate school. The ethnocentrism of Vulgarity America can be amusing when members try to get their first job or realize that dorm life at Biola is much more like most non-college apartment complexes than dorm life at UCLA.
If you accept this picture of “two Americas,” one that glories in the new vulgarity and the other that is saddened by it, then you know Barack Obama has a big problem in the up coming election. It is a problem that the type of people who comment on elections are going to find hard to understand, because almost all of the are from or heavily influenced by Vulgar America.
You see most commentators, on the right and the left, come from academia. They come from the culture that does not think the Daily Kos uses a shocking amount of casual vulgarity. The candidates themselves are too old to fully participate in the shift. None of them is foolish enough to publicly dismiss the voters of Other America by adopting the standards of discourse of Vulgar America.
All the candidates are too old to be comfortable with the Vulgar America in public pronouncements and in that way they conform to the rules of Other America. We know all three can heat up a room linguistically, but they mostly do so in the context of anger or attacking opponents. None of them are, at least in public, casually vulgar.
One of them, because of his age and experience, may not understand the visceral reaction to Vulgar America that outsiders have.
Senator Obama is a child of the post-modern academic culture even if he is not fully “of it.” Both Senator Clinton and John McCain are too old to have experience it with full force. Obama might not accept all the private norms of Vulgar America, in fact he almost surely does not, but it is familiar to him as it has been to no other candidate.
Just as Rudy never grasped how New York morals appeared to much of the rest of the nation, so Senator Obama appears tone deaf to Other America. It is not all anti-intellectualism, stupidity, or racism that makes people cringe at the Reverend Wright or when aide after aide drawn from the left of the modern academy stumble into Vulgar-speak.
People may not alway quickly grasp that his aides ideas are leftist, but if they live in Other America they can visit the blogs and the pro-Obama sites and see that they are not speaking their language. The casual ranting about things Other America would never rant about tells Other America all they need to know.
Senator Obama is best understood as coming out of the blend of government and academic conferences and non-profits that often views itself as the best part of the nation. He “gets” that world . . . including the new rules of Vulgar America. As a result, the harsh words of Jeremiah Wright (”d- America”) do not sound so harsh to him and opposition to them must be all about race.
He repudiates some of the “ideas” of Reverend Wright, in good academic fashion with no clarity about which ideas he rejects. Even most Democrat primary voters don’t see how alienating these words are, because at least a big plurality of them live and work in Vulgar America.
If you read Daily Kos . . . daily. . . . or at UCLA or a public school, Wright’s words don’t sound so harsh to you, but if you live in Other America, then they still can shock.
Swearing in Other America is tolerated for serious enemies or rage. Applying d- to the United States is freakish, while Vulgar America considers it freakish that I just won’t spell out “the d word.”
Right-wing think tankers just like left wing ones understand Senator Obama because he understands their language and values.
Of course in saying this, I do not merely (or even mostly) mean profanity. Vulgar America is not just vulgar . . . it has its inspirational catch phrases, songs, and heroes. Obama knows these perfectly and hits all the high notes like a prophet of the new Vulgarian age. If his aides hit the low notes, then even critics, if drawn from Vulgar America, are not so offended, because they get where the low notes are coming from.
Of course, in private McCain surely swears like the sailor he was, but he does so when, in accepted Appalachian fashion, he is mad and on the attack. This actually is weird and disturbing to Vulgar America. McCain is too much Rough Rider. He seems dangerous. McCain does not get their grace notes . . . some ideas just seem foolish to the old pilot to consider . . . and he is mad at the wrong things and in the wrong ways.
McCain may swear far more than Barack Obama, but he does so like Other America and not like an academic. It is not John McCain’s swearing that shocks them, but when he swears. He seems to mean it and want to do something about it. He is not vulgar, but heated and Vulgar America likes “cool.” John McCain is not much of a talker, God forbid you have to lead a seminar with him as a student, but he a doer.
Vulgar America likes diplomats. Other America likes Rough Riders.
If I am right and all of the media and talkers, right and left, are drawn from those who swear and get angry, but only at those who want to stop talking, then all will struggle to understand why some things Obama does do not resonate with a majority of Americans.
They began speaking (on the right and left) of Obama-mania when he has hardly every drawn more than fifty-one percent in the polls and now routinely runs behind McCain in a year that should be a slam dunk for Democrats.
Bill Clinton, the last hero of Vulgar America and the last candidate also drawn from academia, got the same star treatment. They still considered him popular, though he never got half the vote in an election, until he attacked the greater hero Senator Obama. The fact that President Clinton won, in two three way races, means that Senator Obama can win, but that it will be very, very difficult.
The bad news for Democrats is that the ideals of the majority of the graduate school set, most charter members of Vulgar America, are not those of the vast majority of the American public, young or old. In fact, many successful and bright people, without being anti-intellectual, have a great deal of justified disdain for a class of people who have never been successful in the free market world. This suspicion holds regarding those who have never worked outside of academia that are on both the left (the vast majority of academics) and the far smaller right.
After all, as one business friend snorted, is there anything funnier than a radical libertarian student opining about getting government out of business who has never done anything significant outside the heavily government subsidized academic/think thank world? Perhaps only the twenty-two year old student who cannot, quite, grasp the difference between the horrors of employment at Wal-Mart and slavery, who has no experience of either. When academics seriously compare the pains of the “cultural imperialism” of a Golden Arches opening in Paris to the real imperialism of the ancient world, most Americans just laugh. The lines of Frenchmen clutching sacks of hot fries ans slurping Diet Cokes with plenty of ice, do not strike the same horror outside of a seminar room as as sacked villages and mass murder.
Most Americans understand it is better to live here than in Cuba, but this can be a hard question in whole slices of academia.
Add to that those skeptics the Americans who fall prey to the evils of anti-intellectualism and any candidate from academia is in electoral trouble. Ask Stevenson how his run against Eisenhower went. (Anti-intellectualism is the error of trying to cure on disease by the its opposite. Just as the best solution to greed is not being a miser, so the best cure to intellectualism is not stupidity.)
Democrat and Republican commentators may miss this seriousness of this problem until the very end. They will never be as offended by Senator Obama’s refusal to wear an American flag pin as Other America. Most of us will never understand the horror at the “d- America” line in Other America, because for many graduate school forced us to hear this sort of talk often.
If I am right, then Vulgar America is about to learn that they are a minority in the nation . . . again. But they will not learn their lesson, since they will blame other problems (racism and anti-intellectualism) for the rejection of their favored candidate . . . just as Stevenson Democrats died believing America was just too stupid to elect a hack academic and pol over the man who won the Second World War.
If the war hero beats the glib academic, then Daily Kos will apply profanity to McCain they rarely apply to terrorists and move on to find the next Howard Dean who cannot win outside of Vulgar America.
Source:
I have argued before that Senator Obama is the perfect candidate for the graduate school set. Now someone far more knowledgeable than I (as C.S. Lewis is to me in apologetics so is Michael Barone in politics), has confirmed it with piles of evidence.